Like I said on the last page, Market Research is crucial and you need to spend
time selecting your market and building your keyphrase lists.
Rush this stage and you could end up doing lots of work for nothing so follow
along.
The first thing you need to decide is whether you are going to target an affiliate
product market or rely on adsense and advertising to generate money.
Different people prefer different ways to monetize their blogs but I’ve always had
more success with affiliate programs over Adsense.
It also lets you gauge the market and see how profitable it is incase you’d like to
sell your own product in it sometime in the future.
So if you want to set up a blog to promote mainly affiliate programs here’s the
steps to take to uncover the best markets.
The first thing you need to do is broad list your potential affiliate programs by
making a list of the ones having success. I prefer promoting Clickbank products
because of the high payout on each sale.
You can promote a range of info products and physical goods from your blog
using affiliate programs on Commission Junction and Amazon but for starting out
I’d recommend Clickbank.
So you first need to head over the Clickbank marketplace which has thousands
of info products in it. Spend a few hours browsing through all the categories and
sub categories.
There’s no need to go more than 2 or 3 pages deep in any sub-category because
most of the successful sites will be on the first page with a few smaller niche
products on the second and third.
If you want to spend some time on the research phase then it’s a good idea to
track new products on Clickbank and watch for any climbing the marketplace
from pages 4 and 5 and then snap them up to promote as soon as they hit the
third page. This has been a very successful method I’ve found to avoid
competition while still having great conversions.
Once you’ve found some affiliate programs you need to check the stats to narrow
them down.
The 2 main stats to look for are the %/sale which needs to be at least 50% but
you need to look for programs that pay 65% and above for best results. The next
most important is %refd which is the percentage of sales generated by affiliates.
You are wanting this 60+ or even 70+ with the only exception of if the product is
new and affiliates aren’t yet promoting it.
In the past I’ve only aimed at products with high gravities but from testing I’ve
seen even low gravity products sell very well… it just depends on the market you
are aiming at.
Using these guide lines you can make a list of products you’d consider promoting
on your blog.
The next step is to evaluate the amount of search engine traffic you can drive to
your blog. Now traffic will come from more places than just the search engine but
this is one of the easiest ways to evaluate the phrases your potential market
searches for.
You can do this using free software like Goodkeywords or the trial version of
Wordtracker.
http://www.goodkeywords.com
http://www.wordtracker.com
An excellent resource I like to use is MSN Ad Center. If you don’t have an
account you can set one up for just $5 and because MSN is the first search
engine your blog will appear in you can see numbers just for the MSN search
engine.
I’d suggest you use one of the first software pieces along with the MSN results.
What you need to do is now search for a few broad keywords relating to the
potential market. These can be found in the product title and in the websites of
the products.
e.g. Dog Training Secrets ebook broad keyword would be dog training
Here’s the results you’ll see…
(You can see many 3 and 4 word keyphrases getting searches from this broad keyword)
Without traffic your blog will never even get going so it is the life of your blog.
Numbers alone aren’t enough. Here’s the 3 things you need to see with the
above research.
 Main 5 Keyphrases Ad Up To At Least 5k On Goodkeywords And 2k On
MSN
 You Can Find More Than 10 Long Tail Keyphrases. These Are 4 Words At
Least.
 Some Keyphrases Are Related To The Actual Problem The Product
Solves
You can also get an understanding of the phrases the market is searching for
which leads us on to the next part of the research to qualify affiliate products.
Now you know what the market is searching for you need to see if there is
advertisers spending money on Pay Per Click ads for those keyphrases.
The best place to do this is Google.
Simply type in your keyphrase using “ before and ” after the phrase.
e.g. “planning a beach wedding in san diego”
Now on the right hand side you’ll see all the advertisers paying money for clicks
from this keyphrase…
You MUST see some advertisers for your main keyphrases. If there aren’t
advertisers then it’s a red flag because it shows the market isn’t very profitable.
You’re also looking for the info product you’ll be promoting. The best possible
thing you can see is the is that most of the ads you see on the first page are info
products and mainly the one you’re looking to promote.
Now if you see just one or two ads for that product on the first page then it’s great
news and you can short list this market.
From the 3 methods above you can easily select a few winning markets to base
your blog on and have a few strong affiliate products to promote.
Now earlier we talked about just having Adsense or similar on your blog. If this is
the case then you don’t need to worry about the affiliate program side of things.
The main research that qualifies a good market for you is something that can get
you good traffic and that has lots of advertisers paying on Google.